Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  In response to this uproar, Britain's boxing luminary the Marquess of Queensberry urged his fellow Englishmen to speak with their pocketbooks. Although he refused to come out in direct opposition to Johnson's exhibitions, the marquess chided Londoners for taking Johnson too seriously and advised them to boycott his engagements and let the bad box office numbers speak for themselves. The marquess maintained that both the public and the press needed to acknowledge their role in creating the international Johnson phenomenon in the first place. Their unquenchable desire to see Johnson vanquished, along with their fascination with the lascivious and extravagant details of his life, had elevated the black champion to superhuman status. The English needed to remember that Johnson was just a mere man, and a black man at that.103

  As English performers fought to keep Johnson out of their theaters, the African American champion chose to strike back in the court of public opinion. Rather than accepting defeat at the hands of the VAF, Johnson decided to call the trade union's bluff by going in front of audiences at the Euston and South London music halls to determine if they agreed his shows should be cancelled. He doubted that the antipathy toward him reported in London newspapers was actually true. Much as he had done from the docks of Le Havre, Johnson used his public appearances as a chance to explain his side of the story. “If there is no popular feeling against me, I shall insist on all my engagements being fulfilled,” Johnson announced. “I may produce a little sketch to exhibit the Mann act, under which I was wrongfully accused.”104 He would not only secure his engagements in England but also unleash a transatlantic protest against his maltreatment in the United States.

  The African American press chose to focus on the positive, fashioning the news of Johnson's appeal to the British public into a vindicating story of white populist support. A correspondent for the Chicago Defender declared, “The man in the street showed tonight in an emphatic manner that he does not share in the hostility to Jack Johnson, the American pugilist. He regards the Champion as the victim of persecution which is due to color prejudice.”105 Johnson's presence had purportedly provoked public condemnation of white American racism, as London's streets were alive with talk of the Mann Act, lynchings, and Jim Crow segregation.

  In reality, Johnson's public relations efforts were only a partial success, as British fans received him with a mix of curiosity, admiration, and outright revulsion. In anticipation of Johnson's arrival at the Euston music hall, spectators packed the venue, while a large, boisterous crowd waited outside hoping to catch a glimpse of the black heavyweight. After hearing that Johnson's show had been postponed for the night, the two VAF members who had refused to perform, British comediennes Maidie Scott and Beth Tate, finally agreed to go on stage. Of the two, Scott was the first to appear. Her comedy sketch was rather short-lived, as “the so-called vindicators of fair play” centered in the cheap seats of the pit and gallery shouted her off the stage.106 Later, when Tate made her entrance, the same raucous spectators catcalled and booed, compelling the comedienne to leave in disgrace.

  Outside the theater, the black champion's arrival inspired screams of excitement. “Johnson was almost smothered by the mob that got on all parts of the car, and the police had great difficulty in clearing a pathway for the pugilist,” the Defender correspondent described.107 Johnson slipped into the music hall during the darkness of a bioscope exhibition. When the lights came up, he bowed for his cheering fans, as several English ladies tossed him bouquets. Johnson's attempt to address the crowd inspired a counterdemonstration by several young men in the audience, who effectively shouted him down.108 Police even had to intervene to prevent a brawl between these men and Johnson's supporters. With all of this commotion, the black heavyweight was forced to leave the theater in the middle of his planned speech.

  Determined to be heard, Johnson traveled to the South London music hall to continue his protest. “My only crime is that I beat Jeffries,” he declared.109 According to the Defender, Johnson then made a bold gesture. Noticing that he was standing underneath a U.S. flag, the black champion stopped speaking immediately and ordered that the Stars and Stripes be replaced with the French flag. The English audience went into “convulsions” of applause and several white American visitors left the theater in disgust. Not only did Johnson send a clear message about his unwillingness to be bound by the racial antipathy of the United States, but in choosing the Tricolor over the Union Jack, he also made a powerful visual protest against British prejudice. Although this account of his appeal to the South London audience was likely more fantasy than fact, it revealed just how much African Americans hoped that Johnson would find a color-blind haven. Despite his best efforts, he was forced to cancel his London engagements.

  In reflecting on Johnson's many challenges in England, Billy Lewis called the entire situation “disappointing.” Although Johnson had tried to escape persecution in the United States, he now found himself in another jam. “He was not a criminal in his own judgment, nor in the judgment of many others,” Lewis wrote. “He had a right to be heard.”110 Although disheartened by Britain's racism, Lewis attributed some of it to the “anti-Negro virus” brought there by the mainstream U.S. dailies and white American visitors. “If we will profit by our American experiences and those beginning in England,” he argued, “we will act so as to preserve France and the rest of Europe as havens of rest when the goad presses sorely at home.”

  Johnson's tour of the continent in the fall of 1913 revealed that it was already too late. The black champion encountered protests against his exhibitions and faced hostile audiences. Belgium had even banned him. Where they would still have him, Johnson was reduced to engaging in cheap stunts, strongman feats, and wrestling matches for trivial sums of money.111 The mix of curiosity and derision that greeted Johnson was hardly surprising since his tour built on a complex history of black American performance in Europe. By the turn of the twentieth century, cakewalk troupes had popularized African American song and dance and so-called “nigger fashion” in cities like Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam.112

  Johnson refused to admit defeat. More strategic than true, the Defender's reports of his continued success in Europe shaped a narrative of Johnson as a celebrated and sophisticated New Negro. In the dispatches supplied by his nephew Rhodes, Johnson's continental tour was akin to a royal procession, enjoyed by Europe's common folk and aristocracy alike. As Rhodes described Johnson's visit to Vienna, “He is being greeted everywhere and is having the best of success. Besides giving boxing exhibitions he and Mrs. Johnson do the tango and the audience goes wild.”113 Rhodes's glowing account of his uncle's warm reception in Budapest also highlighted the barbarity of white American racism. “At the Budapest University, which is six times larger than the Chicago University, a boxing tournament was put on for the benefit of ‘Jack,’” Rhodes boasted. “There is no discrimination against the colored man. When one sees how like a man he is treated here, he wonders why he remains in America to be treated as serfs [sic].”114 Even with its long history of feudalism and monarchy, Europe still had a thing or two to teach the supposedly democratic United States about racial tolerance.

  Regardless of Rhodes's impressive reports, black Americans appeared to have been relegated to the field of popular entertainment for the amusement of white European audiences. Whether in London, Paris, or Berlin, it was difficult for them to find jobs that did not involve a racialized performance of some kind. With few other options, black working-class men often jumped at the opportunity to do this type of work. In the eyes of many of their middle-class counterparts, this was hardly an ideal situation. One correspondent told the Chicago Defender, “If there was a better cultured class [of black people] in England than there is they could demand better positions and respect from the English people.115 While there were few African Americans living in Holland and Germany, those who did were “of the unfortunate type that [gave] the dominant race a bad impression of the whole.”

  Years later Johnson effectively erased his
own confrontations with Europe's color line from his 1927 autobiography, In the Ring—And Out. His desire not only to remake his notorious image in the eyes of the U.S. public but also to present himself as a cultured, cosmopolitan citizen of the world seemed to prevent him from publicly reflecting on the darker aspects of his European exile. The contemporary reports of Johnson's European sojourn, however, reveal that he traveled within a much larger network of black Atlantic sportsmen and performers who, try as they might, could never fully escape the shadow of the global color line.

  5

  Trading Race

  Black Bodies and French Regeneration

  What with the ostracising of coloured pugs in America and Australia, France remains the only hunting ground for them. Interracial contests will not be tolerated in England, so that we may, before the passing of many moons, see Paris occupied by the blacks. Already, and with but a slight pull on the imagination, one might easily fancy oneself in bad old Benin.

  —F. H. Lucas, “Black Paris,” Boxing, 4 January 1913

  In April 1914, a few months before Jack Johnson's match in Paris against yet another white hope named Frank Moran, the Chicago Defender received a rather unfavorable report on the state of race relations in France. Writing from the Hotel des Deux Gares, Ernest Stevens, the well-traveled black chauffeur of U.S. industrialist and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, confided, “I have not seen many Afro-Americans and I would not advise anyone to come here looking to better their financial condition, as there are very few avenues of employment open to them.”1 As Stevens noted, “The only exception, perhaps are theatrical folks and prizefighters, and even the latter is not advisable, Paris having been overrun with fistic aspirants of every shade and kind.”

  Uncharacteristically negative in his assessment of life in France, Stevens advised Defender readers that they were better off staying home. “There is only one Afro-American in Paris who can say that he is happy and that is Jack Johnson,” he argued. Stevens recounted his visit to the black world champion's home in Asnières, a “fashionable suburb” about ten miles outside the city. Johnson had looked “robust and healthy,” occupying a grand residence that included a large playground and poultry yard as well as a garage housing “several first-class cars.” In order to maintain this home, however, the African American heavyweight was constantly on the move with boxing exhibitions and theatrical performances in various countries. Despite Johnson's ostensible success, he was slipping further and further into debt. Johnson himself had even advised his black fans to “remain in America,” where they could “become good and influential citizens” and could “get one hundred cents worth for every dollar they spend.”2

  Regardless of these practical realities, France had long cultivated an international image of racial tolerance, particularly among African American athletes and performers. At the same time, as men like Johnson searched for safe spaces of exile, they deliberately played into these French sympathies. Thus, French spectators and black American boxers ironically found their interests aligned, and yet this complicated relationship relied on an uneasy and unequal truce. Although French sportsmen enjoyed gazing at African American pugilists on stage and in the ring, they ultimately viewed black men not only as different from white men but also as fundamentally removed from Western civilization. As much as both sides claimed to operate above the color line, they remained imbricated in the racial and imperial politics of the day.

  In 1908 the French sportswriter Jacques Mortane mused, “One must believe that our treatment of the niggers [nègres] is more pleasant for them than it is in America.”3 His proof was the recent influx to Paris of black American fighters such as Sam McVea, Joe Jeannette, and Jack Johnson. As Mortane acknowledged, these men left behind the pervasive racial segregation in U.S. boxing, where black American pugilists often had to fight each other repeatedly for second-rate purses in front of sparse and unenthusiastic audiences.

  Struggling to gain notoriety and wealth as well as to find challengers worthy of their skills, African American boxers were drawn to the City of Light. The French sporting establishment actively promoted Paris as the one place where black men could thrive in an unprejudiced boxing ring. According to a Washington Post report, “Tales true enough of McVey's easy money from knocking out French champions…[had] reached America and tempted several others to enter the game.”4 McVea's victories as both a fighter and a businessman had convinced many African Americans that “Paris was a paradise for negro pugilists.” As the report noted, “McVey, a Paris resident, manages himself, being clear-headed and taking advice from a Paris law firm.”5 Denied a fair shot at success back home, in France McVea was the quintessential New Negro—tough, determined, and independent.

  McVea and his contemporaries formed one of the first black American expatriate communities in France. “We have at present, ‘three negro villages’ in Paris,” one French sportswriter observed in 1911. Typically, white managers set up training camps for their “stables” of black fighters: Battling Guiller arranged the matches of McVea and Kid Davis; M. Galvin managed Dixie Kid, Andrew Dixon, Bob Scanlon, and Frank Crozier; and Joe Woodman handled the likes of Sam Langford, Bob Armstrong, and Cyclone Warren.6 African American pugilists could be seen all across the city. They trained at Luna Park, and they fought at the Folies Bergère, Les Halles, the Hippodrome, Fronton Bineau, the Nouveau Cirque, and the Wonderland. They spent their free time in Montmartre and even frequented the glitzy nightspots of Montparnasse, setting the stage for the tumulte noir (black craze) of jazz-age Paris.7

  Thanks in part to the well-publicized Parisian exploits of black boxers, narratives of French racial exceptionalism became ingrained in the African American popular consciousness. In August 1914 an editorialist for the New York News claimed that many black Americans were praying that France would emerge triumphant in the World War. Countering white American reports that trivialized “the black man's love for the Tricolor” as a childish reaction to the French embrace of Jack Johnson, the editorialist maintained that “the reason for the black race's convictions” was “far more sensible and substantial.” “The Frenchman alone, whether at home or abroad, whether approached by a single black man or surrounded by ten thousand Guineans, treats the black man like a man,” he declared. “The whiteman's [sic] burden to the Englishman means money, to the German it means conquest, to the Frenchman it means the spread of civilization.”8 Even though the writer downplayed the importance of Johnson's popular stories of success in Paris as a reason for African Americans' affinity with France, black boxers were some of the first black celebrities to praise the European nation's supposed color blindness.

  Unlike the Anglo-Saxon powers of the United States and Britain, France appeared unafraid of black fighting men, whether in the boxing ring or on the battlefield. The fact that the French military had been actively recruiting black troops in preparation for a possible war helped to reinforce their reputation for racial tolerance. For many black Americans, France's use of African soldiers seemed to be a significant step toward the ultimate realization of black political independence. “Africa will eventually be for the Africans,” the same editorialist declared. “Until that time the African favors France because France favors the African.” Yet underlying these utopian narratives of French racial exceptionalism was a fundamental mistranslation of the significance of blackness, particularly black manhood, for constructions of white French nationalism and the French imperial mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission).9

  Questions of color were at the very heart of black American prizefighters' great popularity in France in the years before World War I. Their physical presence inspired French sports enthusiasts to publicly reflect on questions of race, gender, empire, and civilization, for they provided a comfortable abstraction of the colonial question. As French fans embraced these black sojourners, they endeavored to project an image of enlightened imperial benevolence, one that stood in direct contrast to the racial oppression of Jim Crow America.10 African
American pugilists capitalized on this French fascination with “blackness.” From Paris they not only critiqued the backwardness of U.S. negrophobia but they also articulated their own vision of what it meant to be a New Negro. Eager to join in this interimperial conversation on race, white American journalists mocked the “peculiar” French adoration of African American boxers. Apparently, Frenchmen's joie de vivre, coupled with their Latin effeminacy, had rendered them incapable of shouldering the white man's burden.11 Although the personal circumstances of black boxers often improved when they arrived in Paris, they remained tangled in the web of a transnational culture of race.

  Despite France's official rhetoric of color blindness, it was a major player in this burgeoning trade of racial ideas, images, and spectacles. The transnational space of the boxing ring confounded French sportsmen's attempts to distance themselves from their supposedly race-obsessed Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The ring was an important cultural “contact zone” in which Parisian spectators actively engaged in the global flow of ideas about race, manhood, empire, and the body, translating and adapting them for their local circumstances.12 Thus, their embrace of black American pugilists must be placed within the context of French imperial culture, the widespread fears of white degeneration, prevailing narratives of French racial exceptionalism, and France's longstanding fascination with U.S. race relations.